Ask HN: How do you fix engineering culture?

Oh, they're well aware of all that. Also, the CEO knows I'm looking for solutions.

sounds like quite a blamestorm

I'm struck by the way you threw out two totally different types of complaints.

Some people will always complain about too much micro-management and macro-management - that's fairly normal. Some people will always not like the guys on the other team, etc. Bugs will happen. Good managers can alleviate these problems and hiring experienced professionals (with the associated price tag) and making a concentrated effort will usually do the trick.

On the other hand, complaints about not having a minimum level of respect in the workplace (complaints about sexual harassment and racism) are a huge problem. If you have multiple people leaving because of sexual harassment or racism, you need to find out who the hell is acting inappropriately and fire them. Make sure your HR is up to snuff; remind employees of the appropriate ways to report these problems; and act appropriately when you receive reports.

Employees will deal with not liking everybody. Money and calm managers will do the trick. Employees leave immediately when they feel they aren't getting the basic level of respect required by law in the workplace (and sometimes file expensive lawsuits).

While not as applicable in situations where the engineering team isn't under much pressure to deliver, there's a pretty common negative feedback loop that can occur with engineer staffing. While under pressure, teams with an adequate or bountiful number of skilled members will generally perform pretty darned well and not have a problem. If anything causes the balance to start tipping too much in the ratio with unskilled team members then the skilled members will feel more internal career growth based pressure to find work elsewhere. As they start to slowly phase out to other locations the ratio gets even worse, the quality of the product gets worse, and the moral gets worse. All of this causes more incentive for the skilled engineers that are still left to leave as well.

Unfortunately as this happens a higher number of deliverables will be missed and more bugs will arise alerting management that they somehow have become a less productive shop. This is where you can readily identify bad engineering management. Instead of tackling the root of the problem many places double down by increasing pressure to deliver and by relaxing standards as to who they hire. Once this happens you've unfortunately started the process of being a sinking ship. This can be righted in time depending on how large the company's coffers or how tight of a hold they have on the market but growth generally will have peaked by this point.

What management should have done (or needs to do ASAP) was to start trimming poor performing engineers. Yes firing people is hard, yes it sucks getting rid of workers when you're already behind schedule. But any good engineers you manage to trick into joining this dysfunctional team will likely leave within the first few months anyways. Relaxing pressure to deliver WHILE fixing the poor performers issue can also help slow down the rate you're losing good performers at least for a short period.

I've seen this at many many places. Currently still in one of these situations because they keep throwing more money at me to stay but even with that I've started looking again because the situation is not helping my career growth as much as I wish.

edit: IpV8's checklist is also really important to look for and lack of that could cause the start of tipping the balance as mentioned above.

> Employees will deal with not liking everybody. Money and calm managers will do the trick.

Woah. That's the money quote for me.

Now that you mention it, we haven't had calm managers in engineering in a while. The recent managers were always extremely angry or anxious, and always afraid not to make progress or making mistakes. I believe those fears trickled-down to the rest of the team, changing the whole group personality.

Money is not really a problem (we just had another seed round), but we lack calm managers, indeed.

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> On the other hand, complaints about not having a minimum level of respect in the workplace (complaints about sexual harassment and racism) are a huge problem.

> Employees leave immediately when they feel they aren't getting the basic level of respect required by law in the workplace (and sometimes file expensive lawsuits).

Sorry for not being clear. The complaints of sexual harassment and racism were dealt with appropriately. HR dealt with the offender by firing him and nobody was surprised.

However, I wonder if you're also talking about rage outbursts, screaming during work hours and inappropriate e-mails. Because this is the kind of thing HR (and the rest of the company) is having trouble dealing with.